New and promising developments in hydraulic engineering, such as geotextile- encapsulated sand elements, are sometimes hampered by the lack of design rules. That's probably the reason why planners, designers and contractors are therefore rather hesitant to apply geosystems. Most of the design rules are empirical in nature and this means that existing experience is therefore required to design new structures. For this reason it is a challenge to design a structure when only limited experience is available with that type of structure. This was the idea of the CUR-committee F42 (CUR Building & Infrastructure) and therefore existing experiences and research results where gathered and bundled in the CUR-publication 217 Ontwerpen met geotextiele zandelementen. The original CUR-217 publication is in Dutch and this manual makes the contents of this publication available for an international audience. Most of the manual is a translation of CUR-217. However, additions have been made to give the manual more international relevance. In addition some improvements and corrections have been made--Provided by publisher.